Wednesday, August 28, 2013

I see that Julie Burchill (above), a journalist who recently wrote an article
with the headline “Tell us to drink 'moderately'
and we'll just crack open another one,” has been interviewed by the BBC about
Ava Gardner. She said, “A woman with no
temper is like a Bloody Mary with no Tabasco.”

Personally
I’d say that a woman with no temper is like a Bloody Mary with no vodka, but I sure wouldn’t want to get
into an argument with Julie Burchill.
And the fact is people put all kinds of stuff into a Bloody Mary: there are
a few bars in New York where they lay out the ingredients so you can make your
own recipe. Ktchn, on West 42nd
Street offers 20 extras including black-lava
salt, capers, peppers and bacon. This is
what one version looks like (which to me looks like a Bloody Mary with a fruit and veg cocktail in it):

I’ve been poking around trying to find a
picture of Ava Gardner with a Bloody Mary in hand, and
I’ve failed, though there’s no shortage of her sipping on other beverages.

However, thanks to the late Peter Evan’s Ava
Gardner: the Secret Conversations, we know that she did indeed drink Bloody
Marys at least once in a while, with moderately disastrous consequences. She was dating, and drinking and arguing with
her then boyfriend Howard Hughes. Hughes punched her in the face, dislocating
her jaw, and she picked up an onyx ashtray and smashed it over his head. Long after the event she said, “There was
blood on the walls, on the furniture — real blood in the Bloody Marys.”

Tuesday, August 27, 2013

I just reviewed Michael Paterniti’s book The Telling Room A Tale of Love, Betrayal,
Revenge, and the World's Greatest Piece of Cheese (Dial; 349 pages; $27), for the San Francisco Chronicle. The piece was a little bit slow
coming out, so I’ve been reading other people’s reviews of the book, and it
seems the world and his uncle thinks it’s the greatest thing since sliced
cheese, whereas I thought it was just kind of OK. Anyway here’s the
review at the SF Chronicle website (I think you’ll need a digital subscription
to read the whole thing):

Gwyneth Paltrow famously once
said that she’d rather smoke crack than eat cheese from a can, which must mean she’s never tasted Páramo de Guzmán, a great and
“eccentric” Spanish sheep’s cheese, that usually comes steeped in olive oil, in
a distinctive white tin. It may not be as addictive as crack but it
certainly gets its hooks into Michael Paterniti, and creates the obsession
driving his new book “The Telling Room.” To be clear, a commercial
version of the cheese is still produced, but the word is that it’s a “soulless”
(incarnation of its former self. The last great tin of Páramo de Guzmán
was opened and eaten a decade ago, and Paterniti was there to share it.

His obsession begins in 1991, a
time when he admits cheese for him meant Cheez Whiz, Cheez Doodles and
Cheez-Its. He reads about Páramo de Guzmán in his local deli’s
newsletter. There it’s described in enticing terms, “rich, dense, intense
… sublime … discovered it by chance in London … made with love.” Since it
costs $22 a pound, Paterniti has “no intention of buying any,” but the words
stick with him, indicating that right from the start the obsession is literary
and philosophical, as much as gustatory.

As a professional writer,
Paterniti is on the lookout for a good story, and in due course he decides
he’ll track down some Páramo de Guzmán. A little research reveals that
it’s not being made any more, but there seems to be an even bigger story than
he thought. He visits the eponymous village of Guzmán, in Castilian
Spain, does some detective work, makes multiple trips, and eventually goes to
live there for a while with his family.

The story of the cheese is a good one. The original recipe was ancient
but had never been written down and was lost for a while until, in the 1970s,
Ambrosio Molinos, the flawed, larger than life hero of the book, recreated it
to honor his father and his ancestors. Ambrosio’s story is inseparable
from that of his cheese, a narrative of tradition, culture and family, though
one that, well before Paterniti arrives on the scene, has ended in disaster,
with a flurry of law suits and accusations of fraud. By Ambrosio’s account all this
is the fault of Julian, a lawyer who drew up the contacts, once his best
friend, now a man he wants to kill.

Paterniti writes, “I’d spent years traveling the
world for my job, hoping to meet someone like this Ambrosio … someone who
actually had a grand philosophy of life. Who was ribald and holy.
Who had staked his life on a code ...” The problem for the reader is that this
grand philosophy doesn’t amount to very much. Ambrosio is in favor of
raising your own chickens, believes we should go to nature for answers, thinks
food should not contain preservatives; which is OK as far as it goes, but it
sounds like the kind of thing you can hear in any farmer’s market in
America. It also occurs to the reader, long before it apparently does to
the author, that Ambrosio may be a highly unreliable narrator. Or perhaps
it does occur to the author, but he holds back the thought for the sake of a
good story.

Paterniti is beguiled by Ambrosio, precisely because he’s a great storyteller,
and so the book becomes in part a meditation on the nature of stories.
The “telling room” of the title is a bodega, a manmade cave, once a place
to store produce, now more often used as a venue to eat, drink and talk, and in
Paterniti’s case also to write. He styles himself a collector of stories,
which gives him scope for digressions; about soccer, Goya’s Black Paintings,
the history of amputation, the Spanish Civil War, among other topics.
This is a bit hit and miss, but a few asides about Walter Benjamin do seem
especially relevant. Benjamin is quoted as saying, “The perfect narrative
is revealed through the layers of a variety of retellings,” and Paterniti, like
Benjamin, is keen to reclaim narrative as a form of fable.

Consequently Paterniti’s quest sometimes takes on mythical and mystical
aspects. He sees Ambrosio as a giant in his lair, while he sees the
cheese itself as a symbol of “lost purity.” Less grandly,
he sometimes seems simply to be looking for a different,
more authentic way of life, other times the book feels like the description of
a midlife crisis.

The book also contains the story of how it was written, an extremely long and
difficult process, we’re told, and we’re given details of contracts, deadlines
missed, drafts abandoned. We even learn the size of the advance from his
English publishers, who seem to think he’s writing a novel.
Ultimately then, Paterniti’s real quest is to write a book, a quest in which he
self-evidently succeeds.

Paterniti does tell a good story and he certainly leaves me desperate to taste
of

piece of
ancient Páramo de Guzmán, a cheese that is now lost to history. I’m not
sure it would actually live up to Paterniti’s claims, but as with all the best
stories, you sometimes just have to take the author’s word for it.

*

As for tinned cheese in general, I gotta say I think Gwyneth has a point.

Thursday, August 22, 2013

I’ve been reading an interview Anthony Bourdain
did for Yahoo TV. One of the
questions: What do you think of people
who Instagram their food? Bourdain
replies, “Look, I'm guilty of it, too. I think it's worth making fun of. We
deserve to be mocked. It's a dysfunctional, even aggressive practice. Why do we
Instagram pictures of our food? It's not to share. It's to make other people
feel really bad. … It's basically a f--- you. You say, "Look what I'm
eating, bitches." You don't want people to be eating dinner with you when
you Instagram a picture of your food. You want them to be eating a bag of
Cheetos on their couch in their underpants. It's a passive aggressive act. That said, I do it all the time.”

I’d have thought Bourdain was way too cool
to do Instagramming (even I feel like a tool when I photograph my meals) and
I’d also think he’s too cool to do passive aggression. Why not active aggression? But I guess it’s all publicity to further his
“brand.” And hell, it’s not such a bad
brand.

I went and looked at his Instagrams – some
very enticing pics with some very terse titles, such as Lobster Night:

Lunch Sicily:

The Glory of Spain:

And the one below has no caption at all
but seems to be in South Africa. Pap Beef Curry – pardon my immature snigger:

I cut Bourdain plenty of slack for two, linked,
reasons. First, he knows a good
guitarist when he hears one. In an
interview with Karen Brown for Etsy.com she asks him: If you could bring
back four dead rock stars, who would you bring back? After Johnny Thunders, Stevie Ray Vaughan and
Joey Ramone – he goes for Robert Quine.
Robert Quine!! All right!! – the
only truly great bald guitarist or at least the only one who ever seriously fessed
up to his baldness. Brian Eno writes of
him,” Our
friendship clicked and resolved itself around the following: a love of
wandering round New York and eating in obscure oriental restaurants” also of
course “a feeling for music that was 'at the edge of music.'”

Bourdain is also a fan of the desert – he’s done
at least two shows about the Mojave, and in one of them he and Josh Homme from Queens
of the Stone Age go to eat and drink at Pappy and Harriet’s in Pioneertown, a place I know somewhat, and a place I became aware of because of that other great guitarist and desert guy Howe Gelb, who used to live close by, though this pic is obviously taken in Arizona.

And here are Bourdian and Homme at the bar of Pappy and Harriet's, where I have frequently sat.

I think Bourdain rather overstates the desert weirdness
of Pappy and Harriet’s – the place is often full of kids and old couples doing
line dancing, but I do believe their steak sandwich with thinly sliced Santa
Maria BBQ topped with grilled onions and shredded cheese on toasted French
bread- $11.95, is pretty much
unbeatable.It’s what I always get when
I’m there but I’ve never been so uncool as to take a picture of it. Others, I’m sure have felt no such inhibition.